WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Tag Archives: New Jersey

Yesterday’s EPA PFAS plan does nothing except to study for a year or more
what has already been studied.
Where are the limits on amounts of these firefighting chemicals in water
that would enable EPA or GA-EPD to test private wells,
for example for
the PFAS that got into groundwater from Moody Air Force Base’s
Wastewater Treatment Plant,
causing Moody’s report to say be careful eating fish caught in Beatty Branch
or Cat Creek, upstream from the Withlacoochee River?
Where are the funds and methods to remediate the problem and to stop
it getting worse?

Georgia Power, local electric cooperatives, Duke Energy, FPL:
all are spending on solar power.
However, Georgia and Florida remain behind New Jersey and Massachusetts
in deployed solar megawatts.
It’s an election year, and this should be an issue.

OilPrice.com calls it “a critical decision yesterday,
that could jeopardize the future for pipeline projects across the country”;
pipeline companies could be “spooked” and
“…the court ruling raises the unsettling
possibility that the project may be forced to shut down —
after billions were spent putting it in into service.”
Other stories say this ‘huge’ win could also affect
the Atlantic Sunrise, Penneast, Atlantic Coast, and Rover Pipelines,
among others.

(L to R) Lea Fox, 4, Finn Ryder Purdy, 4, and Mason Dana, 7, of Lake
Worth, sit with gas pipeline protesters outside of Florida Power and
Light headquarters on Universe Boulevard in Juno Beach on October
14, 2016. The Sabal Trail Pipeline began supplying FPL’s plants in
June. Groups opposed the pipeline that will start in Alabama and
bring fracked gas through several counties in Florida’s springs and
wetlands. (Richard Graulich / The Palm Beach Post)

Sad for FPL, Duke, Spectra, and all the other pipeline-building
purveyors of fracked methane, maybe, but glad for all the
landowners whose land was taken, local citizens who don’t want
a 500+-mile IED next to their homes, schools, and waterways,
and all people who want clean sun and wind energy, not more polluting fossil fuels.

It’s good the industry press agrees with what I told the VDT:
“This is wind in our sails and could be the end of Sabal Trail.”

The smell of hazardous Mercaptan “would come and go” for at least two days
starting August 5, 2017, and Sabal Trail had been doing some sort of work at the Dunnellon Compressor Station starting the previous day,
although they hadn’t bothered to inform local first responders.

Only two weeks after
the July 16-17 stink leak,
Sabal Fail again caused expense
for Marion County Fire Rescue in sending trucks and personnel.
Unlike the private Sabal Trail Transmission LLC, Marion County responded to an open
records request, and here are the narrative incident reports.

The Commissioners for the one county on every Sabal Trail fracked methane path ever proposed,
Suwannee County, Florida, meet tonight at 6PM in Live Oak.
I can’t go, so I sent them this letter (PDF).
If you can go, please do, or you can send them a letter, too.

To: Suwannee County Board of County Commissioners,

Dear Commissioners,

Thanks again for your hospitality at your meeting of December 15th.

Solar and wind can make coal go away with no need for natural gas.

The FPL representative who spoke didn’t seem aware of what Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning said about solar power last June: “If somebody wants to buy distributed generation, I want to sell it to 'em." See Herman K. Trabish, UtilityDive, June 11, 2015, “Inside Georgia Power's move into the residential solar market: The utility says it will offer solar through an unregulated business, but installers fear possible anticompetitive impacts”:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/inside-georgia-powers-move-into-the-residential-solar-market/400562/

That meeting gave me deja vu about a
few years ago when Georgia Power and Southern Company were claiming Continue reading →